Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Moscow: Press Trust of India says that a
court in Tomsk has turned down a petition that asked for a ban on a
translated version of Bhagavad Gita.The petition was originally filed in June in Siberia and has created a diplomatic stress point for India and Russia. India's
External Affairs Minister SM Krishna met the Russian Ambassador
Alexander Kadakin earlier this week to discuss the matter.Prosecutors
in the Siberian city of Tomsk have argued that the Russian translation
of "Bhagavad Gita As It Is" promotes "social discord" and hatred toward
non-believers. The text is a combination of the Bhagavad Gita, one of
Hinduism's holiest scriptures, and commentary by A.C. Bhaktivedanta
Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness (ISKCON) that is often called the Hare Krishna movement.The
prosecutors had asked the court to include the book on the Federal
List of Extremist Materials, which bans more than 1,000 texts including
Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kempf" and books distributed by the Jehovah's
Witness and Scientology movements.Yuri Pleshkov, a spokesman for
ISKCON in Russia, said the book in question has existed in Russia for
25 years and has never inspired violence or extremist activity."On the contrary, this book teaches humane attitude towards all living beings," Pleshkov said.The
trial follows this year's ban on the construction of a Hare Krishna
village in Tomsk and is based on an assessment by professors at Tomsk
University, who concluded that "Bhagavad Gita As It Is" includes strong
language against non-believers and promotes religious hatred and
discrimination on the basis of gender, race, nationality and language.The
trial began in June and was scheduled to conclude on December 19, just
after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's two-day visit to Russia.
That day protesters gathered outside the Russian consulate in Kolkata,
and the speaker of the Lok Sabha adjourned the House for several hours
after members began shouting in anger over the proposed ban.Indian
officials last week appealed to high-level Russian authorities to
intervene. The Bhagavad Gita "is not merely a religious text, but one of
the defining treatises of Indian thought," said Indian Ambassador to
Russia Ajai Malhotra in a statement. "The Bhagavad Gita has circulated
freely across the world for centuries and there is not a single instance
of it having encouraged extremism."The Foreign Ministry
insisted that the Tomsk court was concerned not with the Gita but with
the author's commentary and poor translation in "Bhagavad Gita As It
Is.""I would like to emphasize that this is not about 'Bhagavad
Gita,' a religious philosophical poem, which forms part of the great
Indian epic Mahabharata and is one of the most famous pieces of the
ancient Hindu literature," ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said
at a briefing in Moscow on Thursday, adding that the book was first
published in Russian in 1788.Still, followers of the Hare
Krishna movement in Russia see the proposed ban as a result of continued
intolerance of minority religions by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Pleshkov estimates there are at least 150,000 Hare Krishna devotees in
Russia."The current problem is, above all, the misuse of the law
on combating extremism," Pleshkov said. "It is used to search for
enemies where they cannot even be defined."In 2005 a Russian
Orthodox archbishop asked the mayor of Moscow to ban the construction of
a proposed Hare Krishna temple, calling the Hindu deity Krishna "an
evil demon, the personified power of hell opposing God," according to
Interfax. The temple was later allowed in a Moscow suburb.